A few months ago, an elementary interventionist told me her district had tightened student screen time limits. She was trying to ensure students completed their Tier 2 math intervention within the new 45-minute weekly cap.
The intervention required logging in to one platform for lessons, then another for progress monitoring. Literacy ran on yet another. None talked to each other or tracked time, so she did what she also does for assessment results across tools: added it all to massive Excel spreadsheets, by hand to try and track it.
The math is the same that many districts across the country are now trying to make work.
In April 2026, the Los Angeles Unified School District Board unanimously approved a resolution that will, beginning in 202627, eliminate district-issued devices for students in early education through first grade and require the development of grade-level daily and weekly screen time limits (Merod, 2026).
Board member Nick Melvoin framed the move as an opportunity to recalibrate after the pandemic-era expansion of 1-to-1 devices. LAUSD is the second-largest school district in the country, and other districts are watching closely.
Beneath the debate is a more substantive question districts have been wrestling with. What kinds of instructional evidence are formative assessment products producing, and is it the kind teachers can effectively use? The screen time conversation creates an opening to recalibrate formative assessment practices more broadly.
What formative assessment actually is
The word “formative” has been stretched in the marketplace in ways that make it hard to connect it back to its research base. Black and Wiliam’s (1998) synthesis of more than 250 studies defined formative assessment as the process used during instruction to provide feedback that adjusts teaching and learning.
The Council of Chief State School Officers (2008) refined it as a process embedded in instruction, with the explicit purpose of improving students’ achievement. Perie, Marion, and Gong (2007) make the point sharper: formativeness is a property of use, not of the product.
An assessment is functioning formatively only to the extent that the information is used during instruction to adjust teaching and learning.
What authentic formative practice looks like
Formative assessment as a process promotes practices that have been doing the heavy lifting in classrooms for decades. None requires a screen.
- Conferring. A teacher sits next to a student during independent work, asks one or two open-ended questions, and listens. In three minutes, the teacher learns more about the student’s reasoning and misconceptions than multiple-choice items can produce.
- Peer feedback structured around clear criteria. Students review each other’s work using a shared rubric, then revise. Done well, this gives every student opportunities to receive and act on feedback and supports the kind of self-regulation that Hattie and Timperley (2007) identified as a target of especially powerful feedback.
- Exit tickets, designed thoughtfully. Two to three open-ended prompts at the end of a lesson, asking students to apply, explain, or critique. Designed well, an exit ticket gives a teacher actionable information by the next morning.
These practices treat formative assessment as embedded in teaching, not as a separate event. They generate evidence at the right grain size and moment to act on. And the evidence is about thinking, not just correctness.
Questions worth asking your formative assessment vendors
- What does the research behind this product show about student learning outcomes
- What is the grain size? A 15-item quiz score rarely informs a same-day instructional move, even when the dashboard looks pretty.
- How does the product support teacher interpretation, not just data collection? Kingston and Nash (2011) are clear: gains come when teachers translate data into decisions.
Screen time pressure is not going away. The constructive response is to ask whether the formative practices the research supports are getting the space they deserve. Formative assessment was always about the teaching move that follows.
It is the small, ongoing work of noticing what students understand and adjusting what comes next. The screen time conversation is a chance to remember that.
References
- Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Assessment and classroom learning. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 5(1), 7-74. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969595980050102
- Council of Chief State School Officers. (2008). Attributes of effective formative assessment. Washington, DC: CCSSO.
- Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81-112. https://doi.org/10.3102/003465430298487
Kingston, N., & Nash, B. (2011). Formative assessment: A meta-analysis and a call for research. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 30(4), 28-37. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-3992.2011.00220.x - Merod, A. (2026, April 22). LAUSD imposes screen time limits starting in 2026-27. K-12 Dive. https://www.k12dive.com/news/lausd-imposes-screen-time-limits-starting-in-2026-27/818224/
- Perie, M., Marion, S., & Gong, B. (2007). A framework for considering interim assessments. Dover, NH: National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment.
